Why Marange diamonds corruption is too hot for Zacc
The harder one thinks about it, the dimmer the prospect that the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (Zacc) will ever deal with the mega-corruption at the Marange diamond fields. This is because probing Marange leakages largely translates to investigating the sitting establishment.
corruptionwatch WITH TAWANDA MAJONI
Marange rough diamonds
There were clear signs, especially from 2009, that the ruling elite, rags-to-riches hustlers, foreign dealers and agents from mining companies were looting the gems from the Marange fields. In March 2016, President Robert Mugabe acknowledged that at least $13 billion out of an estimated $15 billion generated through diamond extraction and sales between 2008 and 2015 had gone missing.
With Zacc having been established in the mid-2000s, it was expected to do something about the pervasive reports of gem looting. It didn’t do that. Most probably, it won’t do it in the absence of significant shifts in the political establishment.
On paper, Zacc was supposed to make numerous interventions as guided by both the constitution (Section 255) and the Anti-Corruption Act (Chapter 9:22). The most obvious function, which Zacc has almost exclusively focused on in other cases, was to receive and investigate complaints relating to the diamonds corruption.
The commission must also have adopted strategies and methods to promote honesty, financial discipline and transparency in the Marange diamond mining sub-sector by, for instance, monitoring and examining lincensing, shareholding and procurement systems while contributing to tightening mining legislation. Further, it must have enlisted and fostered the support of the public in combating Marange corruption and investigate any conduct by individuals suspected to be connected to diamond leakages and other forms of corruption.
As pointed out above and in last week’s installment, Zacc did none of the above.
The failure and/or neglect by Zacc to get involved in fighting corruption, money laundering, theft, office abuse and national economic prejudice at Marange can partly, but best, be better understood if one appreciates what was actually involved. At the centre of the intricate matrix of factors constraining Zacc anti-graft interventions is state-based capture of the supply side of the diamonds corruption. In other words, the ruling elite played a key role in providing access to diamond looting.
The 2012 Global Witness report, for instance, provided a narrative of how the security sector was actively involved in the extraction and underworld sale of diamonds to fund overt missions, projects and operations meant to keep the Zanu PF government in power. To date, no-one from government has come out to refute the findings by the group. Other reports, again unrefuted, went as far as to claim that the army, central intelligence and police were allocated separate diamond mining rights in the gem fields.
Lending some support to this claim is the opaque shareholding structures in some of the mining companies. Anjin Investments provides a telling example. On its website, the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation (ZMDC) says it had 10% share power in Anjin, while 50% went to a Chinese outfit, Anhui Foreign Economic Construction. Anhui is said to be directly linked to the Chinese army. ZMDC says “government” owned the remaining 40%. This is confusing because the corporation is a government entity which owned 50% in all the other mining companies except Marange Resources where it had 100%. “Government”, however, is said to mean the Zimbabwean army.
Besides, high-profile government officials, prominent among them Obert Mpofu, were directly named as alleged culprits by, among others, the 2013 parliamentary report whose production was led by Edward Chindori-Chininga who subsequently died in a mysterious car accident. Some likely proxies, such as Goodwills Masimirembwa who has been following Mpofu to almost every ministry he goes, and Robert Mhlanga, a former air vice marshal and Mugabe’s former pilot, have also been named as possible accomplices.
On the demand side of the Marange diamonds corruption was a complex and powerful syndicate of foreign dealers who are reported to have connived with mining company executives and members of the ruling elite to cart the gems away to such destinations like Israel, India, Lebanon and Russia. Some of them, like Sam Pa, a Chinese national, are known allies of influential ruling party politicians.
It may be disappointing, but hardly surprising, that Zacc has not dealt with the Marange mega-corruption. This is when you consider the pervasive presence of State links in the leakages. Zacc has persistently complained that it is underfunded. It gets its money from the Consolidated Revenue Fund, which is controlled by the executive through the Finance ministry. Where the executive, or part thereof, strongly believes it might be exposed through Zacc involvement in anti-corruption processes, it will simply lock the money chest. And chances are high that influential individuals within the ruling elite are not comfortable with Zacc going about sniffing.
The 2013 attempts to probe Masimirembwa by searching the National Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Board (Nieeb) and ZMDC offices provides tell-tale signs of this. Zacc was stopped, using heavily armed police details, from conducting the searches. It is possible that some members of the ruling elite knew the implications of investigating Masimirembwa, a former chair of both entities.
Because of the intricate web of proxies in public sector corruption, Zacc would also never be sure where their probes would land them, which could include big trouble. For instance, exposing corruption by Masimirembwa could in turn rope in Mpofu, then Mhlanga, then, possibly Mugabe or his wife, Grace. Indeed, some of the Zacc commissioners ended up being investigated for trying it on Nieeb and ZMDC.
There is a big temptation to place the ultimate blame on the president. Even as he admitted that billions of dollars’ worth of diamonds were lost, he didn’t say a single thing about government’s intentions to investigate the gem corruption. This is a common story in Africa where leaders don’t take action against corruption because, in some cases, they are beneficiaries. With Zacc now housed under the Office of the President and Cabinet, there is still no sign that the commission will ever get up and do its work.
Anecdotes elsewhere also damn the president. For instance, Tendai Biti, a former Finance minister, told me the other day that Mugabe frustrated cabinet debate on the Marange diamond leakages on numerous occasions. Biti claimed that the president queried why he was obsessed with the diamonds when there were other high-value minerals like platinum to talk about.
Thus, it is abundantly clear that Zacc would always find it difficult to investigate the Marange corruption because doing so would be tantamount to launching a complex, trans-border probe against state-linked political and economic corruption, and exposing too many skeletons in the process.
The fact that government, through the auditor general, initiated an audit of the diamonds in mid-2016 provides a weak case for an anti-corruption fight. It would never make sense for government to first kick out the mining companies and then start auditing them. As predicted, some of them are legally challenging the audit. That could point to government deliberately frustrating a probe into the gem scandal.
Tawanda Majoni is the national coordinator at Information for Development Trust (IDT), a non-profit organisation promoting access to information on public and private sector transparency and accountability, and can be contacted on majonitt@gmail.com
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